1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a machine translation apparatus which can output into the translated text any desired part of the source text without conversion to the target language, and also which can separate and translate any selected grammatical constructions in the source text.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A machine translation apparatus as is known from the prior art is described as follows. A conventional machine translation apparatus inputs the source language text entered from a keyboard into a translation module as controlled by a main CPU, and the input source text is translated into the target language using dictionaries, grammatical rules, and tree structure conversion rules stored in the buffer of the translation module
When a translation is attempted using a machine translation apparatus according to the prior art as hereinbefore described, excessive time is required for translation and said translation often fails when there are numerical expressions included in the source text which must be output in the target language as they appear in the source text because morphological analysis of each element in the numerical expression is executed. Processing is therefore required to pre-delete numerical expressions, thereby increasing the work load on the user. Another problem is that even when a non-numerical selected part of the source text must be output in the translated text as it appears in the original, said selected part is still automatically translated.
Furthermore, when a translation is attempted using a machine translation apparatus according to the prior art as hereinbefore described, the syntax of the original source text is determined according to grammatical rules stored in a buffer. In the event the grammatical rules are not applicable to a specific construction in the original, the original may be misinterpreted and a translation may not be possible. Furthermore, even if the grammatical rules are applicable to a specific construction in the original, misinterpretations may easily occur with sentences in which relationships are extremely complex. Moreover, when long sentences with complex relationships are entered, the processing time increases proportional to the length of the sentence.